Peek Inside Sheila Heti’s ’90s Feminist Zine

Like many teenage girls too smart for their own shorts, Sheila Heti, whose recent novel How Should a Person Be? set the literary world a titter last year, once made zines. We got our hands on an issue of Heti’s own zine, Brillantine, published when the author was 18, which features interviews, cartoons, work by Jenny Holzer, and a call for submissions for a project collecting writing from young women across North America: “We need, as a collective, to promote the art created by young girls. I want it to prove that the shit published in Teen magazines and the sappy stories that win high school English contests are not the best we have to offer. We CAN be political, we CAN be intelligent and edgy and emotional without the requisite angst, etc.” Though the book never made it to print (“They thought it was too risque and probably disgusting;” Heti told Bookforum), you can get a glimpse of the sheer awesomeness of Brillantine, currently on view as part of NYU’s Zan Gibbs Riot Grrrl Zine Collection, after the jump.